Time Management For Those Who Are Broke

John Taylor, a very brilliant marketer, brought up in another post about how
free advertising really isn't free because your time is worth something. He is
absolutely right. Your time IS worth something. Well, regardless of how much
your time is worth (I can't put a dollar amount on yours...only you can) you
better learn early on how to manage your time if you're going to be
successful as an Internet marketer.

This post is designed and targeted to those who are broke and can't afford
paid advertising and/or outsourcing tasks to be done. The paid advertising
you can't really get around. You have to pay for it, plain and simple. But in
many cases, the outsourcing does have workarounds and I'll get to them
later,

But okay, you have your day in front of you and you're basically on your
own as far as marketing your products and services.

Where do you even begin?

The first thing you need to do is figure out when you're most productive.

Some people are morning people, like me. I love to get up at the crack of
dawn and get to work early. Others are cranky and grouchy in the morning
and don't really feel like doing anything until mid afternoon. Others are
night owls. Whatever you are, that's the time of the day when you're
going to do your most mission critical stuff such as product creation,
sales page creation, article writing, advertising, whatever.

The times of the day when you're not really at your best is when you want
to do things like replying to customer support emails and things of that
nature. During your really bad times you might just want to not do
anything at all but relax. Believe it or not, I don't work day and night, not
anymore. I'm getting too old for this LOL. My guitar is getting a real
workout of late.

Okay, but we're still not done. See, whatever period of the day it is when
you're at your best, there are only so many hours in that window. It may
be 2 or 4 or whatever. For me, it's about 6 hours, from 7 AM to 1 PM.
After that, I tend to slow down a lot, especially these days.

But let's say you only have a 3 hour window where you really feel like doing
anything important. What you need to do is take your list of mission
critical assignments and figure out how much time each task is going to
take.

Let's take a fictional example.

Let's say you have the following to-do list for your 3 hour period.

Write 3 articles.
Work on sales page.
Work on new ebook.

Okay, let's say you can write one article in 30 minutes. That's 90 minutes
for the 3. That's half your 3 hour period shot. That gives you only 90
minutes to work on your sales page for your existing product and your
new ebook combined.

This is where you have to find your priorities, and everybody's is going to
be different.

Mine would be as follows:

Current products already finished and selling come first.
Current products almost finished come second.
Future products come last.

Why? Because I have to put most of my efforts into what's making me
money now or what will make me money in the very near future.

In that case, I would spend the 90 minutes on the articles because that
is immediate income, 60 minutes on the sales page because that is income
that will be coming very soon and 30 minutes on my new ebook because
that is income that's in the distant future.

You may feel differently. You may feel that the stuff that's already selling
is already selling so you don't have to spend as much time on it.

So your day may look like this.

1. 90 minutes on new ebook.
2. 60 minutes on sales page.
3. 30 minutes writing just 1 article.

Point is, decide on your priorities, decide when you want to work and then
make a schedule based on those two decisions.

Write the schedule down and tack it up in front of you on your PC monitor.
When stuff is staring you in the face, you tend to do it if for no other
reason than out of guilt.

Every night before I turn in, I make my schedule for the next day. I try
my hardest to stick to it. Sometimes I can't. Sometimes stuff happens.
But at least if it's written down, you have a better chance of doing it.

As I said, this really applies to whether you're broke or have tons of
money. The only difference with having tons of money is that you can
get others to do the work for you.

But if you can't go that route, you can still get things done if you simply
discipline yourself to make a schedule and stick to it.